Proposition 8 and the Continuing Tedium of “Rights” Discussion

As many of you probably already know, there is a measure coming up on the ballots to define what constitutes a marriage in the state of California. Naturally, when these sorts of things happen, the usual tiresome group of loud people presume to make a lot of fuss, argue badly, and waste everyone’s time with nonsensical statements.
Caitlin recently gave me a pamphlet that was mailed (I believe) to her house which attempted to argue against gay marriage, and she was laughing all the way about how the entire thing was a huge logical fallacy. I checked it out and, sure enough, it was a long loop of begging the question (I’ll put some logical fallacies in the “Terms and Definitions” tab here in a little bit). For those of you unfamiliar, Begging the Question is a logical fallacy involved when an argument assumes, as one of its premises, the very conclusion which it attempts to prove. It is circular.

The people pictured above (credit of Wikipedia’s article on Gay Marriage) are of the very obnoxious breed who offer no arguments, but who instead think that plastering unsupported claims on paper are going to do anything at all, other than bully the weak-minded towards their point of view.

Let’s try an experiment in logic and see if we can’t get to the bottom of this.

First, let us talk about what “right” means in regards to this issue, as people keep using that word without giving a very clear inclination as to what that means precisely.

The first thing that occurs to me about something being “right” in a society is actually just a variation on the word “natural.” If you consider it, you’ll find that eating, sleeping, working, raising a family, and so forth, are all considered “right.” That is, the things that occur in nature are usually our basis for what we consider right and wrong to be. We tend to think of a boy marrying his mother, as one example, to be not natural, because of the ill effects this has on the gene pool (though the average person will not frame the problem in those terms; and I realize that there are Freudian issues to discuss on that example, but let’s leave those out). Now, when we go to fit homosexuality into this framework of the “natural”, we see that it doesn’t actually fit. Now, agree or disagree with the practice itself, one must admit that, from a strictly evolutionary perspective, a homosexual couple does not contribute to the all-encompassing organismic march through the gene pool, as homosexuality does not produce new offspring, and creatures of the same sex who ignore other members of the species of the opposite sex do not pass on genes, do not advance the species, but merely serve as one other unfortunate “mistake” which gets weeded out of the gene pool in favor of organisms better suited to survival in their environment. As the saying goes, there are no “if’s, and’s, or but’s” about this. Reactionary readers who might be offended by this statement are advised to pick up Darwin, or at least read a summary (I do not recommend Origin of Species as light reading).

Moving on, it becomes clear that homosexuality does not fit in our usual framework for what we consider “right.”
Very well, then, you might say, nature is not the end-all for all, or even for most, people. Let us, as it were, appeal to a higher court.

Now, the higher court in the considerations of morals is of course the spiritual one. Spiritual systems of morality and ethics –namely, religion– tend to not only bypass or ignore the state of things in nature, but often go against them, or at the very least, try and show that man is more than animal; namely, that he is a pure spirit and should live his life in such a way as to reflect this. Perhaps it is in within this framework that we may find a home for homosexuality.

The problem with “appealing” the homosexual case to this higher court is that the spiritual plane, and all the various religions, are very occupied with sexual purity, many going so far as to declare sex itself to be impure (as priests are required to take vows of celibacy) and many others tolerate sex only grudgingly as a specific thing, to be done in a specific way, with a specific partner, in a specific situation (i.e, a member of the opposite sex, in marriage, etc.). It goes without saying that homosexuality is far from acceptable, and is often considered to be outright sinful virtually across the board. Why this is so is the start of another topic.

Again, this is how things are. Reactionary readers are again advised to pick up a Bible, a Qur’an, a copy of the Torah, some words on Buddhism (specifically the quest to escape from desire), or to take a World Religions class.

Very well, you might say, all the rules, laws, and ethical systems view homosexuality as negative in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons.

Why do we care about laws and rules and systems anyway? You might say that we don’t need those things –or even– that those things aren’t real, and don’t have any weight in the first place. Welcome to Nihilism: nothing matters, the whole of existence is meaningless, there is no right or wrong, now can we just go off and do what we want to?

…and the answer is, well, frankly, yes; yes you can go do what you want. HOWEVER (and this is the tricky part where people don’t take thier Nihilism seriously) you can NOT go on blathering about what is RIGHT and wrong, what people deserve, how freedom is so great, ETC., because you have just destroyed the moral systems which you felt were preventing you from doing what you want. You said they were meaningless. But then, you go ahead, and start cheating on Nihilism by saying that some things are “right” and others are “wrong”, namely, that freedom is “right” and people should be free.

Let’s phrase this as a deductive argument:

Freedom to choose is a good thing.
People should be allowed to do what is good.
Practicing homosexuality is a person’s free choice.
Therefore, practicing homosexuality is good (and further, just as good as doing anything else).

Now, what I want to call into question with this argument is premise number 1. Why is freedom to choose a good thing? Says WHO?

Now you begin to see the problem.
Advocates of homosexuality (or really any normative claim about rights, for that matter) try to establish a standard of good after having previously rejected the idea of an absolute standard to judge things by!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t care what you believe or what you do as long as it’s internally consistent.

Lucky for me, I make it a habit to only accept that which is logical and internally consistent.

And so should you! Go out! Challange terms! The next time someone starts trying to sway you, demand definitions on terms! KEEP demanding definitions on terms! Force the average person out of his little world of comfortable, pre-constructed arguments. Stir things up.
Be a gadfly.

2 Responses

Funny (and I’m not saying they are the same thing), but for a very long time people used a lot of the same arguments for slavery: it is natural; it is Darwinian; it is supported by many religions; and if we do away with these legal and moral systems of thought, we’ll have nihilism and chaos, etc.

Thankfully, something, over the course of many years, hard-fought battles and the like, punctured this logic so much that today we consider it illogical. But for a time, the argument that a slave was inherently the same as a free man and deserved equal, humane treatment, would have registered to many as completely illogical.

Logic is useful, but it can also mute the Divine voice attempting to break through and change the way things have always been.